


a god of equilibrium

by rievu



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, more about the specks of mortality hidden in the space of divinity, rather than a relationship-centric fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 19:19:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18835072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rievu/pseuds/rievu
Summary: The Outsider forgets how to breathe sometimes.It’s not important; it’s not necessary. But sometimes, in the middle of the vast Void, the Outsider clutches at his throat —where is his esophagus, his trachea, his pharynx— and finds nothing. No air, no flesh, no material there to breathe. He chokes on the realization, but he doesn’t know if he can even choke if he can’t breathe. The lifespan of a god is doomed to be eternal, and eternity is such a wide space for forgetting such things. Such unnecessary things. But they were once necessary to the Outsider in the days when he was mortal and was ignorant to such concepts like divinity and immortality. The ever-present whalesong in the distance now sounds mocking, and the Outsider clenches his fists into semblances of shadow.The Outsider forgets sometimes.// a character study on the outsider and how he forgets (and remembers) to be physically mortal





	a god of equilibrium

The Outsider forgets how to breathe sometimes.

It’s not important; it’s not _necessary._ But sometimes, in the middle of the vast Void, the Outsider clutches at his throat — _where is his esophagus, his trachea, his pharynx_ — and finds nothing. No air, no flesh, no material there to breathe. He chokes on the realization, but he doesn’t know if he can even choke if he can’t breathe. The lifespan of a god is doomed to be eternal, and eternity is such a wide space for forgetting such things. Such unnecessary things. But they were once necessary to the Outsider in the days when he was mortal and was ignorant to such concepts like divinity and immortality. The ever-present whalesong in the distance now sounds mocking, and the Outsider clenches his fists into semblances of shadow.

The Outsider forgets sometimes.

 

* * *

 

Litanies sung by witches at night, white bone charms gleaming in the light that filters through his shrines, and the infinite sea that crashes against the eroding shores. These are the tools that the Outsider uses to build his body in the corporeal world.

Perhaps this is why they call him god in this world. Granted, he has the powers of the Void. That is certainly one reason why these mortals call him a god, but perhaps there is a simpler reason. He walks such a fine line between monstrosity and beauty, and mortals have always had a hard time comprehending that concept. They have always called it _divinity_ instead.

Perhaps that is the reason why so many of his chosen are so irreverent. Oh, there are a few that grow mad with the power and a few that treat him with even more reverence than a god. Vera Moray is one of those people, and so, the Outsider quickly tires of her. He leaves her raving in a sea of ruby-eyed rats that mingle and meld into a single, seething mass.

But Corvo doesn’t.

When the Outsider peers at the half-broken, grieving man in his dreams, he finds that Corvo Attano has no care for the divine in his soul. The Outsider does not bother to build a body in Corvo’s dream and chooses to reside deep in the shadows that trail after Corvo.

Corvo chases after his empress over and over again. Each time, he fails. The empress falls once more to the ground, staining the concrete floor of the gazebo with a scarlet that is too bright to be blood. The Outsider knows this much about blood. It is an understated thing that the Void either likes to paint with a vivacity that far outpaces its own capacity or with a kind of blackness that strips all the oxygen — all the _life_ — out of the substance. It seems like the Void has chosen vivacity for Corvo’s dream tonight.

The Outsider brushes a finger absently through the blood. The red gleams on his finger with a wet sheen and the Outsider tries to mimic the same red in his own veins. He forgets to form a complete heart and set of capillaries and arteries and veins though. He starts to splash out a trail of half-made blood, vibrant with false life. The Outsider frowns at the poorly made blood and dismisses it. His blood turns to whale oil before it soaks back into the Void.

“To the left,” the Outsider advises when Corvo comes lurching up the gazebo steps again. Corvo blinks at the sudden sound, and the dream runs through its sequence. That moment of hesitation is enough for the empress to die once again, but this time, Corvo doesn’t start over. Instead, Corvo fixes his furious eyes on the Outsider for the first time in this dream. The Outsider leans against the railing and examines his fingernails absently. They’re not made well; too sharp, like knives instead of crescent moons. He glances up at Corvo and repeats, “Next time, go to the left a little bit more. Perhaps you’ll succeed this time, but I think we both know the answer to that.”

Corvo’s mouth twitches, and his hands ball into fists. “This is a dream,” he finally says. His voice is soaked through with a Karnacan accent: something that years in Gristol has not torn away from him.

“Correct,” the Outsider replies evenly.

“What are you doing here?” Corvo demands. “Why are you making me relive this day?” He narrows his eyes at the Outsider and snarls out, “Outsider.”

The Outsider shrugs. “I have no role to play in your dreams, Corvo Attano,” he says simply. “You are the one dreaming. You are the one reliving through your old memories. I am not a god of dreams.”

Corvo’s shoulders sag, and he stumbles away from the Outsider and the empress’s prone body. “Then what are you here for?” he wearily asks. “Are you here to taunt me? Steal my soul?”

“Oh, the Abbey does like to paint me as humanity’s greatest enemy,” the Outsider sighs. His tone remains dispassionate as he gestures to the rest of the Void swarming at the edge of Corvo’s dreams. “They are correct in that the universe is unknowably vast, but I could frankly care less about my hostility towards your existence. I am simply a bystander, my dear. If anything, I enjoy watching history warp as words pass from the lips of one to the ears of another. Imperfectly formed, half understood, poorly remembered.” A smile creeps across his lips — he remembered to form that part of his body well — and he pauses.

“But I do not exist to steal,” he tells Corvo. “I do not care about destruction or gain or whatever else the Abbey whispers into the ears of your people. Rather, I am a god of equilibrium. I do not create, and I do not destroy. I merely give people the ability to change their surroundings, to change their forms, to change the tides of history. A nudge is all it takes, and the total energy of the world and your universe remains the same. And I watch."

Corvo watches him, still wary and still on edge, but he quietly says, “Then, are you here to watch or are you here to nudge?”

The Outsider shrugs. He’s intrigued by the man, yes, but for now, he settles for watching. There are whispers in the city, words that he hears with the ears of rats and feels with the bloated shores of the river. Whispers about a plan to free Corvo and unleash him onto a city that he once loved.

Ah, correction. A city that he never loved, but a city owned by the woman he loved.

To the Outsider, that is so _delightfully_ interesting.

The gazebo starts to dissolve around Corvo, but the man’s gaze is pinned firmly on the Outsider. “Whatever it might be,” he starts.

Corvo never gets a change to finish. The dream abruptly shatters around him, and Corvo’s yanked back to his waking nightmare inside Coldridge. The Outsider remains in the Void, and without the structures of Corvo’s expectations, his form dissolves away into the Void as well. He looks down at his formless self and tries to nudge his shape back into something more human-like. He uses the memory of Corvo as an outline to reshape out arms and legs, but he fails to recreate the bones just right. He uses whalebone to stack up his ribs and hollows out a thoracic cavity with shadows. He fills his veins up with whale oil and still, he finds his body lacking.

As it always is.

 

* * *

 

Piero dreams, but unlike Corvo, his dreams are wide and expansive. There are gears inlaid into the structure of this dream, and whale oil forms a river in his dreams that fuels a greater fire at the center of Piero’s mind.

It is easy for the Outsider to slip on a stream of oil, and with a strand of whalesong, he anchors himself to Piero’s dream. The inventor is on a bench in his dream, laboring over some new creation that is half-formed and half-thought in his mind. The object whirls and spins until the Outsider touches it with a single finger.

Piero stumbles back and knocks back the bench that he was sitting on. “Wh—” he manages to sputter out.

The Outsider smiles at him but keeps his lips closed. He doesn’t know if he’s formed his teeth right. “Hello, Piero Joplin,” he says.

Judging from Piero’s loud screech, the Outsider suspects that his teeth aren’t quite right. Well. Not a grand loss by any means.

He gestures out to the rest of the workshop and asks, “Would you like to see something new?” It’s not a question that merits an answer. In response to his words, the walls of the workshop unfold outward and bleed into the streets of Dunwall. A sea of black fur rises up and pours out from the storm drains hollowed out in the streets. The Outsider glances back at Piero’s white face and casually says, “One of my favored ones. Dead now, but the memory remains.”

He is not a god of dreams, but occasionally, he can prod the Void into doing what he wants instead of the other way around.

Among the sea of black, a single white rat clambers up to the surface. A boy’s face follows after it and turns to face the Outsider and Piero. The rats continue to move around him, seething and swarming and streaming in the streets, but the boy remains. His lips twitch up to reveal sharp teeth rotted away by poverty and hunger, and Piero whimpers.

“Tell me, Piero Joplin, what do you see?” the Outsider muses. “What does his face look like to you?”

“Rat,” Piero manages to get out. “Red eyes, rotting teeth, hollow cheeks.”

The Outsider arches a brow and beckons to the boy. The boy laughs: a single sound that pierces through the boy. The boy’s eyes flicker from rat-red to human-brown, but ultimately, it bleeds into the black of the Void. The Void-filled boy turns and leaves, and the walls of the workshop come back up, enclosing them in the formerly-bright space once more.

The Outsider knows that this is the Void telling him that he has had his fun. The Outsider sighs, mildly disappointed, but overall, unperturbed by it. He folds his hands behind his back and asks, “Very good, Mr. Joplin. Now, what do you see when you look at me?”

The inventor’s eyes creep over the Outsider’s face, and the Outsider can see the way Piero Joplin automatically categorizes the aspects of the Outsider’s face. It is the part of him that is scholar, inventor, philosopher all in one.

“The color of whale bone and the color of whale oil,” Piero says honestly.

“Rebuild it then,” the Outsider tells him. He presses a bone-thin hand to his face, but his hand is too misshapen to be properly human. The bones jut out of the skin at strange angles, and the Outsider shrugs. It’s been so long since he’s been human that the memory is fleeing his bones. He presses his sharp knuckles into the hollows of his cheeks and feels the black of the Void spill out of the cuts.

Piero opens his mouth to speak, but the Outsider shushes him with a single wave of his too-long finger. “Make me a face out of what you see,” he murmurs. “The work that you create with the skill and talent of your own hands will be the work that lasts for a legacy. I can promise you that.”

“You’re the whale god,” Piero whispers. “What do you need a face for?”

“I do not know why people always choose to name me as a god of something that I am not,” the Outsider sighs. “The whales are, at best, colleagues of a kind. Call me a god of equal exchange instead. A god of equilibrium. Tell me, Mr. Joplin. You are a scholar yourself. What do you know of equivalence?”

“The first law of thermodynamics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms,” Piero breathes out. His hands reach out and scrabble for a journal and a pencil, but the dream isn’t stable enough to give the objects some tangible form. However, Piero shakily continues, “The second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of any isolated system always increases.”

“Excellent recitation, Mr. Joplin,” the Outsider drawls. He slowly claps his hands and the sound echoes in the space of Piero Joplin’s dream. “And to answer your question, there is a man who will change the tides of history and accelerate the entropy of this miserable system. Let him wear my face as he tears up the city. Or perhaps, he’ll take it and change the form of it. Either way, I am interested to watch it happen, and I would like to see him wear my face as he does it. Would you deny me my simple request, Piero Joplin?”

“You’ve forgotten how to wear your face, haven’t you,” Piero softly accuses.

The Outsider lets the tattered remains of his control go, and he can feel his face start to slip from his grasp as he smiles at Piero Joplin. The whites of Piero’s eyes look too bright, but before the inventor wakes, the Outsider laughs, “Equal exchange, Piero Joplin. I am as I always am. My form is simply... Changed. It is not destroyed completely. The Void took something from me, and I took something from the Void in return. Perhaps it was my face.”

He leaves Piero Joplin in the leftover eddies of his own dreams.

But the Outsider knows the price that the Void exacted from him.

It was far more than just a face.

 

* * *

 

The Outsider looks down at the heart he clutches in his bare hand. This is the only hand that he’s managed to form properly, and it looks ghostly white. It is the same hand that snapped open the ribs of an empire to pull the heart out, and it is the same hand that has an empire’s blood drying scab-brown and tomb-black on his palm.

Piero Joplin proved to be a worthy investment. The Outsider keeps the inventor’s dreams rattling at a constant speed, and with every night, the Outsider opens up new avenues and streets in the city of Piero Joplin’s mind. With that, Piero Joplin has wrought a new tool out of an empire’s heart.

The Outsider is more than satisfied.

But now, as he watches the heart, an ugly frown tears its way across his face. The empress who owned the heart is long dead, but her heart still remembers its shape and form. He can spot the ebb and flow of her spirit beating against the electricity that hums through the gears and the stitches and the metal sealing it all together. And yet, the empress and the heart do not forget their forms.

The Outsider tries to form his own heart again and models each artery, each atrium, after the heart he holds in his bare hand. But still, the organ that forms under his touch is weak and withered. It is not an entire heart, not entirely. The dirt from the empress’s grave lodges in his chest cavity, and the Outsider has to tap his hand against the whalebone of his ribs to get all of it out. Eventually, he slices through his cold flesh and tears out the feeble attempt out with his other hand.

Fury grows and roils deep in the empty space that the failed heart left behind, and the Outsider does not _understand._ What is it about the human body that eludes him so? He throws the half-made heart far away from it, and it splashes back into shadow.

His grip tightens on the Heart, and the empress inside snaps back at him with a whisper that is colder than the grave. But the depths of the deep sea are colder than the grave, and the Outsider grows colder than that. The spirit inside retreats, but the Outsider clenches on the humanity of it and tries to force his body to listen, to obey, to fall into a shape that he once knew so long ago.

But that shape was the shape of a body molded out of the lengths of multiple winters and it is a body that is long dead and gone. Severed from him with a single swing of an inglorious blade. Gone, like his name and his life and the bitter, stagnant remains of his tattered soul.

The Outsider lifts his head up and bares his brilliant-white teeth at the leviathans that swim through the Void. It is barely a smile, but he says, “You must find this quite amusing.”

The Void does not answer.

“To think that I watch the workings of men,” he says. “And you watch the workings of _me._ A bitter sort of irony, isn’t it?”

The Void does not answer.

The Outsider settles into his small nook of the Void and settles the blackness around his shoulders once more. Then, let it be so. He waits for Corvo Attano to come to his doorstep like that. Seawater forms his clothes for him, and he thinks that is the Void’s way of an apology. The Outsider exhales before he shrugs on the jacket that the whales sing out of the water and holds the Heart with a renewed grip.

When Corvo comes, the Outsider extends his hand, palm up. The empress’s blood is still streaked across his palm, and the shards of her sternum and her ribcage remain lodged in his shadow of a hand. But the Heart is there — metal and blood and muscle and tissue and sinew and steel wrapped over and over and over around each other — and Corvo looks back up at the Outsider with _hurt_ in his eyes.

“You asked,” the Outsider wearily says. “And you shall receive.”

“A god of equivalence,” Corvo quietly replies. He takes the Heart from the Outsider’s hand and shakes when he hears the voice of the woman he once loved. He looks back up at the Outsider and repeats, “A god of equivalence would not give without receiving something in return. What do you want from me?”

“Entertainment,” the Outsider says. His voice sounds so hollow when he says it, and the Outsider sighs. He’ll have to re-string his throat with some new vocal cords.

“There’s more than that, isn’t there?” Corvo asks. His words make the sentence into a question, but his tone is quiet and withdrawn. The Outsider drags his whiteless eyes up to meet Corvo’s gaze, and the god watches as he murmurs, “There’s always something more to be given and to be lost.”

“Which one will you choose?” the Outsider muses.

Corvo cradles the Heart close to his chest, right above his own heart, but he does not waver in his resolve nor in his gaze. “You are a god of equivalence,” he says lightly. “So I will have to choose both.”

The Outsider leaves, laughing. His limbs and bones and poorly-made organs drop out of him as he looses himself from the constraints of reality. He does not care if Corvo watches as he leaves, but he sinks back into the Void.

Whalesong welcomes back his formless body.

 

* * *

 

Corvo leaves the Overseer alive.

The Outsider lingers at the edge of the Abbey and watches the scene play out like a theatre-goer. He watches with half-lidded eyes. His bone-thin hands prop up his chin crafted out of witches’ songs he heard while he was pacing the districts. The rest is left to the Void, and brine puddles up around him to support his weight.

Interesting. So exquisitely interesting.

The Outsider thinks that this is the most fun he’s had in ages. Oh, he had his laughs and his amusements when he had Daud running through the streets with his name on Daud’s hand. The second law of thermodynamics. The entropy of an isolated system always increases, and oh, Daud took that principle and drove it into the necks of nobles and criminals alike. The Outsider danced in the rivers of blood pouring out of their carotid arteries, all in time with the low, bellowing melodies of the whales deep below the city and in the Void.

Delightful, that was. But this? This is _exciting._

He is older than the very foundations and the stones that this Abbey was built on, and _yet,_ he couldn’t see Corvo’s decision coming. He has spent so many years watching humans rise and fall to the tune of vengeance and murder but never to mercy. A surprisingly human trait of his. He has not made an error in so long, but one thing he didn’t make an error was in his choice of Corvo as his next Marked.

Something thrills down his spine when he watches Corvo depart the Abbey with _his_ name gleaming on the back of Corvo’s hand. It is the name that no one save for the Outsider himself remembers how to read anymore, but something possessive and passionate sparks into the Outsider’s body. The god glances down at his form and notes the way that his body aligns with Corvo’s. Arms and legs and bones all in place. He lacks blood to give him the warmth and vitality that Corvo has in his own veins, but this is quite possibly the best recreation the Outsider has made in a while.

Instead of turning directly towards the Loyalists, Corvo strays close to a shrine. He risks capture and avoids Samuel’s boat to come to _him_ first. The Outsider’s lips split into a smile, and he gathers up his body to greet Corvo.

Corvo leans heavily against the wall, almost tearing down the purple curtains shrouding the Outsider’s shrine. The Outsider can see blood left on Corvo’s skin: a wet patina of scarlet and lost life. It’s sticky and fresh, and Corvo grimaces when he experimentally runs his finger through the stains. It’s all his. Corvo unstoppers a bottle of elixir with his teeth and chokes the liquid down. He sighs with relief when he finishes drinking it.

The Outsider stares at Corvo’s teeth and finds them blunter than his own. He compensates by forcing his teeth to align to human standards. He even tries to imitate Corvo’s eyes by forcing false sclera into his eyes, but he can’t get the white to penetrate through to the inky Void-black that fills his eyes. Some humans say that the eyes were the window to the soul, and the Outsider supposes that’s very much true for him. There’s only Void in him no matter how much he tries to conjure up a facsimile of a body. But the Outsider tries.

The Outsider observes Corvo for a minute more before he finally steps out. “You’ve done well,” he murmurs. He watches Corvo with careful eyes, and then, he starts to mimic the blood. He can feel warmth slowly prickling along his limbs. When he presses his lips into a thin line, he can feel the blood pumping through the thin skin. Slow, sluggish, but _steady._

Corvo glances at him and offers him a smile that’s all teeth and danger. “So, Outsider,” he says. “I’ve done what they’ve asked me for. I’ve done what you’ve asked me for.” He flexes his Marked hand and runs his right index finger over the dark lines bolded on his flesh. The motion sends a shiver running down the Outsider’s meager bones, and the Outsider almost snaps at that.

But the Outsider likes the way it feels.

“And so you have,” the Outsider sighs. He reaches over a pale hand and brushes his own fingers against his name on Corvo’s hand. Corvo sucks in a sharp breath, and in that single sound, the Outsider can hear the desire for touch underlying the frequency of the sound. For comfort, the Outsider suspects, but he does not think Corvo would object to touch of other kinds, but these are the things that the Outsider hears. These are the things that the Outsider provokes in Corvo.

Because it is entertaining. Because he likes the feeling of bone and living flesh under his skin. Because this reminds him that yes, he was once mortal too.

The Outsider withdraws from Corvo and watches the tension rise on Corvo’s shoulders. Almost like the hackles of a cornered beast. The Outsider observes it all and carefully categorizes it all away for future reference, but he continues, “You spared High Overseer Campbell, the leader of a great cult dedicated to loathing me.” The Outsider’s mouth twitches up into a smile. He finds this quite ironic. Exceptionally funny. Exceptionally interesting.

“Did you want me to kill him for you?” Corvo asks.

“No,” the god responds. “I am simply telling you that your choices are interesting me. A rare feat. I am old beyond the Abbey and far beyond the Overseer, but even _I_ did not see that coming.”

“So, you’re saying that the gods are infallible,” Corvo wryly says. “Good to know.” He raises his hand and flexes it so that the Mark ripples across his skin. “This was useful. Thank you for that.”

“I know already,” the Outsider simply says. “I am always watching.”

“Hm,” Corvo says noncommittally. His eyes betray the tone of his voice though. There is a gleam in there that shines of interest and curiosity, far brighter and far deeper than whatever sparked in his nearly-dead eyes in Coldridge.

The Outsider grins before he takes his leave. He manages to maintain his form for a longer period of time when he stalks back into the Void. Then, he willingly sheds his skin and dives towards the bottom of the sea in the form of a whale.

And just for fun, he shakes the seas and makes the wind howl across the ravaged waters to mimic the sound of witches’ songs. It’s been a long time since the Outsider was entertained. As a few whaling ships crack apart under the mere brush of the Void, the Outsider revels in the body of a whale before he twists back into the form of a man with far more ease than he’s had before.

 

* * *

 

No matter what the rumors or what the stories are like, the Outsider maintains the fact that _he_ was not the one to touch Corvo first. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

Corvo comes to his shrine after Lady Boyle’s last party with tension making his flesh and his heart beg for some sort of mercy, some sort of distraction, something to take away the sweetly scented perfume that permeates his clothes.

His face — the one that Piero saw in the depths of the darkness — is the face that Corvo still wears, and his name is the one emblazoned on the back of Corvo’s hand. The man hasn’t bothered to hide the god’s name. The Outsider does not wish to put words in Corvo’s mouth, but he almost thinks that the man is beyond caring. Corvo does not bear his Mark with as much pride as a few of his other Marked have done in the past, but he wears his Mark out in the open with a rather blase attitude.

The Outsider likes it. Call him possessive, but he _likes_ it.

Corvo says a few words. The meaning of them doesn’t mean much to the Outsider. Instead, the god is far more preoccupied with the way Corvo reaches out for his hand first. He brushes his human fingers over the unnatural forms of his hands, and the Outsider struggles to make them lay down flat and in the right shapes. The bones pop and snap under Corvo’s touch, and the man looks up at him with a quiet gaze.

“Does it hurt?” Corvo merely asks.

The Outsider tilts his head and regards Corvo. “I do not know what pain tastes like,” he tells him. “At least, not anymore.”

“Hm,” Corvo hums.  
  
The Outsider asks only once. “What do you want, and what are you willing to pay for it?” he asks. He smiles, and his teeth are made of bone instead of enamel. “You know who I am.”

“Very well, god of equilibrium,” Corvo murmurs. The Outsider can see what Corvo wants, clear and bright amongst his thoughts. “Let me forget for a night. What is the price you want for that?”

The Outsider tugs Corvo closer to him and sighs out, “Give me a body, and I will let you forget. I will give you what you want, and you shall do the same for me. Equal exchange.”

Corvo lets the Outsider tug him closer, lets the god press cold lips to his skin and tear out moans and gasps from his mortal throat. With each touch that the Outsider takes from Corvo, the god molds his body to fit. The Outsider nips a line down Corvo’s throat, and each inch that he moves downward is another inch that is reflected on his own body. He relearns the shape of the hyoid bone, the carotid muscles, the trapezium that rises up and stretches down. Collarbone, sternum, scapula. Soon, when he skates his hands down on Corvo’s body, he remakes his lumbar region and slots each vertebrae into place. These are all things that the Outsider relearns and reshapes his own body into.

Corvo does not remain passive in this exchange. No, he does not. He takes his time to explore the Outsider’s shifting body and presses touch and desire into the god’s cold skin. He nips at the Outsider’s shoulder before he comments, “Colder than I expected.”

“The sea is not warm,” the god tells him.

Corvo smiles against the Outsider’s skin. “Not in Karnaca,” he murmurs. “Not along the summer shore.”

The Outsider flexes his shoulders and lays a hand flat on Corvo’s chest directly above the man’s heart. He uses the rhythm to track down a heartbeat for himself, and the god forces life into his veins. He warms, slowly but surely, and Corvo laughs as he presses another bite to the Outsider’s newly-forged skin.

Corvo does not laugh when the Outsider puts more focus into his work. Now that his body is mostly made and tangible, the god sets about the work of making Corvo forget. He is a god of equilibrium. If Corvo gives, then the god must give as well. It is a balancing act, and Corvo moans, deep and throaty. The Outsider memorizes the sound and endeavours to make the sound repeat.

He is not afraid to play dirty either. The Outsider uses soft tendrils of Void magic to wrench the pleasure out of Corvo’s body. Now that he knows Corvo’s body with a special kind of intimacy, pleasure becomes an easy sensation to tease out of the poor man.

This is a deal that they make with more frequency in the future. With every exchange, the Outsider finds himself remembering the mortal form more easily.

 

* * *

 

The Outsider forgets sometimes.

The concept of breathing, the concept of walking on two legs instead of none, the concept of _living._ He loses himself in the Void — his bones, his muscles, his tendons and ligaments and tissues carefully aligned to match a mortal’s — but the Outsider learns how to find them just as quickly. Eternity may be a wide space for forgetfulness, but eternity is also a wide space for learning new things.

They may not be important; they may not be necessary. But sometimes, the Outsider reaches out for his esophagus, his trachea, his pharynx, and starts to breathe again. The whalesong rumbling low in the distance sounds less threatening, and the Outsider relaxes in the center of the Void’s shadow with his throat intact.

The Outsider forgets sometimes, but sometimes, the Outsider _remembers._


End file.
